Steve Rowe made a comment over on The Martial Archive in which he said of my Machida post:  ‘To state the obvious, it's his traditional budo background and upbringing underlying his mma training that is giving him an advantage. All credit to him for recognizing it. I'm not Shotokan but can still see that the budo training has helped him.’

I’m not sure where the bit was that I recognized ‘budo training’ as influential on Machida’s success.  In fact, I talked about the baggage of the tradition needing to go.  And I’ve written extensively on the ideological implications of the word ‘budo’.  The term ‘budo’ alone is an offensive one, often misunderstood in the West as a collective description of Japanese martial arts.  Westerners use it (often romantically) without recognizing its political and ideological connotations.  However, in Japan the ideological meaning of ‘budo’ is clearly understood as character-building in support of nationalistic ideologies.  Budo is all about the superiority of the Japanese way, in all its hierarchial, right-wing trappings.  By the 1930’s ‘budo’ had become a term closely associated with indoctrination into Emperor ideology and military fascism in Japan.  Check out the links below to quickly find out more.

http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_abe_0600.htm

http://www.kendo-world.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-79.html

Now the interesting guy here is called Nishikubo Hiromichi, who wrote of the distinction between budo and bujutsu.  The latter was a battlefield-derived killing art, but it fell by the wayside over hundreds of years of imposed peace during the Tokugawa period.  Nishikubo saw budo as a character-building practice to support Emperor ideology.  He was looking to produce through kendo practice boys and men for modern warfare who were loyal to the Emperor and unflinching in adversity, but he did not need to produce capable swordsmen.  The sword, by this period, was not only obsolete in the battlefield but also in personal combat. 

So the other problem with the term Budo is that it includes predominantly non-fighting arts with kendo and judo thrown into the mix.  Kendo and judo, whilst they do not fully represent fighting in all its dimensions, are nevertheless full-contact fighting systems that can impart important characteristics to a fighter.  However, the other budo systems of Iaido, kyudo, jodo, aikido, and karate do (with the exception of the modern inventions of Kyokushin Kai and Daido juku) do not include full-contact fighting.  There’s no test of the so-called attributes of the fighter.  As far as I’m concerned, these latter systems don’t belong in the same category as kendo and judo, yet they are lumped together under the aegis ‘budo.’

The semantics of all this are important.  This is because the budo systems coopted a lot of terms that originally had legitimate sources on the battlefield, and used these terms in order to wrap the practitioner in the ethos of a samurai.  But the budo practices themselves had no fighting, and the terms they borrowed from bujutsu had no substance.  They were just words.  Budo itself was largely founded on a fiction.  Read ‘Don’t Drop the Soap’ and look at the part on the Hagakure and Nitobe’s ‘Bushido’.  The foundations of modern budo are bollux.

Now, Machida has taken the principle of initiative (sen) and opening (suki) from the bujutsu (not budo) systems of the past and successfully applied these principles in MMA.  Because he’s successfully done it does not mean that the budo systems (which use the same terminology to suggest a direct connection to the past) are able to impart these same principles.  They ain’t.  Because you got to fight to learn these principles.

It’s very common in the martial arts for people to get hold of a word or concept and begin to converse about it with some authority, without ever having experienced it.  Now, the budo systems in the West don’t tend to be right-wing anti-Communist structures as they still are in Japan, but rather they have moved towards personal development as the goal of their practices.  Yet their use of the terminology of the past continues without ever being tested combatively.  So the Budo practices may contain such terms as ‘sen’, ‘suki’ and ‘zanchin’ but these terms don’t mean anything unless you know how to use them.  Most budo teachers haven’t a clue what these principles are, let alone how to teach them. 

The bottom line is, it’s no good being ‘principle based’ if you don’t have a first-hand understanding of the principle, and that comes through fighting.  People in the martial arts often use words and terms so as to appear to be an authority on a subject, when in fact they have no real-life experience of it.

Machida is the exception, not the rule.  Traditional budo practitioners should not attempt to piggyback on his success.  They haven't earned the right. 

 

 

 

 

This post is in answer to a comment left on my Context Is Everything post.  It comes from Maija Soderholm, a student of the late Sonny Umpad.  Maija is teaching Bagua and Eskrima in California and asked a question about teaching form.  This question goes to the heart of the matter for martial artists. 
So .... my 2 main practices are Bagua and FMA. Bagua is a movement based art, but forms are it's base.
Visayan Eskrima is the complete opposite. Many systems of FMA are taught in patterns of movement, but my teacher evolved over the years he taught, until his death in 2006, to get rid of ALL the patterns in his teaching. In fact he told me NEVER to teach pre arranged patterns, now that it is my turn to carry on his ideas.
Old school Eskrima was you, and your dad or uncle, or some relative, in the back yard with sticks. The basic teaching method was to keep getting hit until you worked out how NOT to get hit!!
Sonny, my teacher moved to the US and discovered that he could not teach that way here - people just didn't come back to class, so at first he went back to the pre arranged patterns that many FMA systems had borrowed from Japanese and other Asian imports to The Philippines.
By the time he taught me - for the last 6 years of his life, he had thrown it all away, saying that it held people back from learning how to really fight, so he started teaching everything in the context of 'random flow'.
I'll say that it was a very difficult way to learn, but ultimately was like being given the Rosetta Stone to understanding strategy.
Not saying I know how to fight, but I'm certainly alot closer from training with him than through the other arts I practice.
So ... after all this rambling on, my question to you, as someone who has thought about this a great deal, is -
I teach both Bagua and Eskrima now, and have come to realize that students LOVE the forms and the movements, and the system is quite easy to teach because of this.
OTOH, Sonny's Eskrima is very hard to teach because there really is no system ...it's all empirical experience and trouble shooting.
Do you think that a progression from structure (forms etc), to less and less is useful, or like Sonny, do you believe it slows down the path to the ultimate goal - fighting?
I ask because I am struggling with working out how to repay my debt to him and pass on his 'system' in an authentic way, and am resisting the ideas of stances, patterns, pre arranged drills etc.

I agree with Sonny.  Forget the form as a starting point, but rather seek to extract from fighting those skill patterns that keep appearing again and again.  These can serve as your reference point, rather than the templates handed down by the tradition.  All martial arts traditions would have obviously started as ‘backyard’ or family systems, but once they’d begun to be widely propagated, nearly all of them have been standardized.  The original essence of what was taking place in the backyard is lost. Sonny would have been an example of a 'master' in the original sense.

But martial arts being practiced today don't rely on that one-on-one 'backyard style' instruction, and they nearly always leave out the fight.  So the problem you’re describing with your students is a problem I’ve lived with for many, many years.  People want an easy solution.  And there’s always the temptation to provide them with a template that will gratify their desire to learn something structured and that fits into their idea of what martial arts are about.  But the truth is, the function of the trainer is not to teach a system, but to create situations that will call for a needed response.  That’s how we learn.  Nobody learns exactly the same way.  Everybody’s got a different brain signature, so each person has to be allowed to address the ‘problem’ of the fight on their own terms.  All you do, as the instructor, is to engage them with a rich supply of experiences that are fight-derived, and be of assistance if you see them going in an obviously wrong direction.

You can’t just teach a skill because there is no such thing.  Everybody’s going to do it differently, and if a person is going to be able to respond spontaneously, then they have to learn in a spontaneous way.   Teaching by rote just fucks everything up.

What you do get by backyard training, particularly within a family system, is a strong empathy between members of the training group—the kind of empathy I discussed in my post on mirror neurons.  You’re able to pick up on the nuances of movement and get a feel for what the other person is doing.  But even then, the members of the group aren’t going to look or fight the same.  Take the Gracies.  They all fight different.  The challenging, competitive training allows the individual's own attributes to develop, so that each fighter finds their own way according to body type, personality, etc. 

Once you start regimenting and organizing that, by saying what the movement needs to be, especially if you don’t have fighting in the training itself, then you’re not teaching the person to become competent.  You’re just teaching them to perform the skill you’ve given them, often completely out of context. 

Because of the peak shift effect, people get enormous gratification from engaging in stylized movement.  There’s a psychological high from doing forms.  So the hard part often lies in convincing the student that the form isn’t the way to go.  You have to let go of the skill patterns and concentrate on the fight, and if your students are happy with their mastery of set skill patterns, they’re not going to like it.  Fighting will obliviate all the nice moves they’ve practiced so hard.  It’s a bitter pill sometimes.

I’d suggest you encourage the students to be responsible for themselves so they’re not expecting to be spoonfed by you.  Try to get them to take an active role in their learning.  And you don’t have to just throw them in the deep end.  There are methods you can use to bridge the gap between the fighting and the fight preparation, and these are relatively safe.  You don’t have to fall back on set patterns.

The advantage we have today is that we can reference a huge amount of fighting footage and watch it again and again.  Skill patterns, and the tactics and dynamics that underlie them, can be extracted from video footage.  When it comes to instruction, you can then use these common skill patterns as a basis for devising technical drills, situational drills, and conditional or open fighting against similar and dissimilar opponents.  I’ve written about this in an MMA context, but you can pick up the principle off my website, and simply apply it to your own work. 

Extracting from the fight is the most important thing, but you can also get a lot of ideas of what might be possible from doing flow drills.  The problem is that whatever comes out of those drills has got to be tested.  With a flow drill, even if it’s performed in broken time, there is a continuity and an element of predictability and compliance.  Even with a live blade--maybe even, especially with a live blade.  Because if there wasn’t, a lot of people would be seriously injured—or dead.  If you are using the live blade, you will be holding back.  That's why personally I prefer to use sticks or a substitute weapon for practice.

As an observer what I see coming out of the flow drill is not only spontaneous expression of what you need to do at the time, but most importantly the ability to pick up cues of delivery, particularly within the peripheral field of vision.  You then become able to process that sensory information and act offensively, defensively or counteroffensively upon it.  Cue drills teach you to see the beginning of the movement and you develop an enhanced perception of time.  A lot of people don’t understand the interval of time, yet it’s within the process of development or renewal of a move that opportunities are often missed and where people leave holes for their opponent to exploit. 

The problem with a flow drill is that it isn’t a fight.  Now, we could just fight all out all the time, but then we wouldn’t be addressing some of the factors that are essential to fighting.  It would just be sink or swim for the student.  There would be no way to get across the key lessons of hitting without being hit, learning to synchronize and syncopate, and being able to retain an enhanced visual and tactile sense of the target.

So what I do, I’ll take a flow drill (empty hand on the feet, on the ground, or with weapons) and during the course of the exchange, without any warning I’ll call, ‘Fight!’ or ‘Hit it!’ and the participants go all out for ten seconds trying to get each other.  Then I say, ‘Stop’ and they go back to flow again.  This enables them to make a connection between skills they’re developing in the flow drill and the violent, unpredictable exchange of the fight.  Sometimes I’ll give a role or a mission to each person to accomplish. 

The progression of flow-to-fight and back will not only test the validity of the various possibilities that may arise in the flow, but because of the short duration of the 'fight' phase, you get a more accurate representation of a violent exchange than you would get with a prolonged, 'sparring' type exchange.  And paradoxically, I've found that these brief, high-intensity exchanges are actually safer than the longer-duration, lower-intensity fighting.

I noticed on Sonny’s film footage that sometimes he would have a partner working at a slower rate to enable him to syncopate and fit several shots in the interval of his opponent's move.  You can take this same drill and turn it into a reality.  You still have one guy coming at you trying to hit you on a predictable beat, and now you’re trying to get three or four shots in between his attacks.  But now he’s coming in hard, full power, and the intensity is fight intensity, not flow.  That puts the pressure on.  Then you can return to flow drill again. 

One thing I do in my grappling is have them engage in a flow drill on the ground.  Then I tell them to stop.  Both parties stop, no matter what position they’re in.  I’ve taken the flow and frozen it.  I say, ‘Take a look around.  What can you get?’  So they can see the opportunities or possibilities to gain positional control or a submission that might have normally passed by in the flow.  Then I say, ‘hit it’ and they go for whatever position or submission they’ve discovered in that moment of freeze.  Sometimes I will designate what I want them to go for.  Sometimes I get them to tell me what they’re going for.  Sometimes we keep it silent so the opponent doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  Sometimes they both go for it, sometimes they each have a different role.  The permutations are endless.

What I then do, I reduce the time I give them to see their opportunity.  They have to spot it quicker.  This starts to train them to rapidly process information and make an instant decision.  This cutting in and out of the fight also teaches them to get a handle on their aggression.  They can switch it on and off at will, instead of being either totally compliant or in a blind rage. 

With regard to your Bagua, looking at Sonny Umpad and yourself on your channel, I think there are already strong elements of Bagua within what he did.  Personally, if I were you I would be developing Bagua more along the same ‘backyard’ lines that Sonny used to teach weapons.  You could devise a free-form flow drill using the circular principles of Bagua.

All of these traditions have a basis in fighting.  I think that if there hadn’t come a period in time when the fighting was removed and the teaching was made more public, then the tradition would have continued to thrive and change.  But without the fighting, it loses its way.  Look at JKD.  It started out with Bruce Lee’s intention to found something innovative and progressive, but after twenty or thirty years it has become an institution.  I look at it and ask myself what would Bruce Lee have been doing now if he were still here?  And I don’t think he’d be doing what they’re currently doing in JKD.  Times change. 

If you’re having difficulty with convincing your group to go the way you want to go, you might try having a group within a group.  When I first started the experimental phase of anything-goes fighting in Earlham Street, I did it with a separate group that met one afternoon a week.  I liked it so much that I then decided to change the whole club over.  Guess what?  Everybody left except for the four or five hardcore fighters.  So I suppose in your mind you’ve got to work out what your priorities are.  Four guys won’t make you a living—believe me, I know!

It’s really sad that such a talented guy as Sonny died so young, and reading between the lines of your comment I guess you feel you are still his student in a sense. I find your loyalty kind of extraordinary.  I respect you for what you’re trying to do in Sonny’s honour and I want to encourage you.  But at the same time, it’s your path now.  Don’t be afraid to take some risks.  That’s what life’s all about.

When most martial artists write, they are trying to validate and promulgate a tradition or a system that they have invented.  They are attempting to build a structure and to appeal to people’s desire to be taught in a structured way.  Not only am I not invested in a system of any kind, but by nature I'm opposed to over-organization and the neat and tidy approach to teaching and learning that is typical of martial arts and especially, the current self-protection trend (about which more later).

This piece of writing started out as a result of Nick Hughes’ challenge on Selfprotection.com to explain why I was dissing karate when I myself had practiced and taught it.  I began writing to set the record straight on certain misconceptions that have plagued me for years.  But like everything I write, this piece touches on many interconnected subjects, and it's bound to digress.

I’m right-brained, and most people are left-brained.  Certainly, the military types who are often found in the martial arts world are about as left-brained as you can get.  Unlike them, I don’t think in bullet points.  I think in a web.  So when you read this, you’ll have to try and follow my spider-mind because my web has a purpose and a logic, but it isn't simple.  I’m articulating a complicated subject the best I can.

Here's one thing I know for sure.  If I had taken an orderly, systematized approach to martial arts, I never could have progressed to where I am now.

And in a sense, that’s the whole point with regard to me and karate.  I was never a part of it and it was never a part of me (as I’ve said in my autobiography).  I’ve said it so many times, but some of the karate aficionados simply can’t take it in.  Over the years, any number of martial artists have expressed surprise and even disbelief when I told them that I hadn’t picked up anything worth learning from my study of karate.  Some of the top names in karate had acclaimed me as the best karate man they had ever seen.  How could I turn around and denounce karate? 

Those who believed in karate often turned their backs on me when I refused to embrace it as they did; others, like Nick Hughes, prefer to dismiss my insights and hours of training, research and application, by calling me ‘an anomaly’—some kind of genetic freak, I guess.  People like to call me a genius because it absolves them of responsibility for doing their own hard work.  And I suspect that for some, trying to flatter me by calling me a genius (or a madman—isn’t it the same thing?) is really just a way of dismissing what I’m saying about martial arts so they can feel more comfortable about what they’re doing—after all, what I do must be just for geniuses, right?

There’s no mystery to my accomplishments.  It’s just that the top names who sang my praises had often been trained one step at a time within the strict formal, hierarchical regimes of the Japanese systems and their Western counterparts.  Therefore, they couldn’t imagine how somebody could do better through training themselves outside the box.  But I had been brought up in a military culture, I had internalized various images of the ‘ways of the warrior’ that were extrinsic to Japanese martial arts (most notably, I’d picked up on my father’s example in his military gymnasium), and from a young age I had taken to anything physical like a duck to water.  And most importantly, I loved to fight. 

So what’s not to believe?  If you engaged in teaching yourself guitar, for example, through the process of trial and error in the same way that I taught myself martial arts for the nine years I spent in the Army before I ever entered a karate dojo, I’m sure that with an equivalent natural aptitude, commitment, and persistence, you’d reach a pretty high standard.  And that’s all I did.

For me, going into the karate systems, the whole thing was a breeze; that’s why I rose to such a high grade in such a short time.  And that’s not me being self-aggrandizing, it’s just that the karate systems are so laughably bad.  Of course that begs the question, why did I practice karate at all?  But that’s one of the subjects of this piece, and I’ll be coming to the heart of it later.

* 

Here’s a key factor in my development.  I had an ultra-aggressive attitude and was prone to resolving arguments with extreme violence.  This, taken together with the fact that I was a self-taught natural athlete, had made my martial arts different from the very beginning.  I can remember using ground and pound instinctively during an altercation with another schoolboy in the lobby of the Majestic Station Hotel, Ipoh, Malaysia at age eight. Nobody taught me.  Sitting astride Brian Hearnes I beat the shit out of him, and every time the staff or the screaming Army wives present managed to drag me off, I fought my way back for more.

When my mother eventually turned up I was dragged off and given a serious beating on the spot, but you know what?  The beating she gave me was worth it. For the very first time I felt empowered, and it was the feeling of empowerment I got through fighting that became central to my existence as a young man.  Part of this empowerment came through my ability to take the beatings that my mother frequently dished out.  People have read about my mother’s abuse of me in my autobiography and some have remarked on the psychological damage she inflicted.  But my take on it is this.  I turned what would have been powerlessness into strength and determination.  She might have beaten me, but she never defeated me, and she knew that—in fact, it would drive her into a greater rage when she saw that she couldn’t get to me.  I was able to detach myself from the beating, and learning to do that factored into my ability to take tremendous punishment in a fight whilst remaining focused on what I had to do.

What makes me different from many of my contemporaries is that I’ve actually embraced violence.  I don’t see it as something abhorrent in the context of a fight between equals; it’s only abhorrent when the strong prey on the weak.  Many martial artists maintain an aura of moral superiority, as though they have mastered their base impulses and sublimated them to a higher goal—you see this a lot in T’ai Chi.  But in fact the practitioners don’t even know what those base impulses are in the first place.  They’ve never put themselves in a position where they might find out.  In order to control your own violence, you have to first find it, arouse it, and then start to get a handle on it and give a positive direction to the energy arising from it.

But martial arts systems, like religions, generally suppress not only individuality, but the primal impulses of their participants.  For those students who are low-key to begin with, they are never challenged to find anything violent within themselves through fighting.  They swallow the line that you don’t have to fight fire with fire.  More highly-charged individuals are taught to repress their violence through the practice of the kata and bunkai, or to channel it into a highly controlled sporting event such as Ippon kumite.  But the end result is the same: the chaotic element of violence is kept under tight control and can never really be experienced within the system.

Violence was central to my development as a martial artist—when I write out these words, it seems obvious that ‘violence’ and ‘martial artist’ should go together.  But when you look at most martial arts today, there’s nothing resembling violence going on.  As a young man, I wasn’t practicing for some hypothetical encounter by an attacker on the streets, or hoping to deal with some drunk on the door.  I was actually  going out and  looking for fights so as to try out for real what I’d taught myself, and I often pitted myself against men who were larger and older than I was.  Sometimes I would fight in a calculated way so as to test a move; other times I’d just fight for a euphoric high.     

I taught myself.  For the nine years I was in the Army, whenever I saw, read about or heard about a move (or whenever a move just popped into my head), I would try it out in the barracks, the NAFFI, on the streets, or in the out-of-bounds areas of Nairobi and Benghazi (which often included  running battles on the streets with the locals). Shortly  after being dishonourably discharged from the Army and working at Courage’s brewery as a drayman, a heated  argument over a barrel of beer developed between myself and another drayman while we were loading up for a delivery.    Seriously pissed off, I knocked the guy out with a flying headbutt and shattered  his jaw in the process.  I’d seen the move in a TV wrestling show hosted by Ken Walton.  The guy was standing about six feet away from me and the move just popped up in my mind’s eye.  The next moment I was flying through the air head-first.  The guy was rushed off to hospital and I was sacked on the spot. That’s what I mean by trying out a move.

Talking about Ken Walton:  apart from the grappling and submission moves I’d picked up in Irving Hancock’s book The Complete Kano Jujutsu, Trevor Leggett’s  Championship Judo, Anton Geesink’s My Championship Judo and a couple of others (I can’t recall the titles), I picked up a lot of  grappling  and submission moves just by  watching wrestlers like Johhny Saint and George Kidd in action  on Saturday afternoon TV.  I’d then rehearse the moves with my mate Pete Cook, a junior boxer, and at some point down the line I’d try them out in a fight.  

On my website I’ve told the story of knocking out a six-foot plus MP when I was 17 with a round kick to the head.  What I didn’t mention was that I’d learnt the move from an illustration in Leong Fu’s  Karato course—or it might have been Joe Weider’s.  This is what I mean by being self-taught.  Not that the kick to the head finished him off completely—whilst I was bathing in the glory of what I had done and talking to those who had gathered round to ask me where I’d learned to do a kick like that, he came back at me.  The ground and pound I gave him put him in Catterick Military Hospital for a few days, and I have to add that he’d have spent a few more  days in a military bed if I’d known at the time that he was an MP.  From my experience of them, MPs were bully boys and thugs, and like most squaddies, I despised them.

*

In Nairobi I was posted to a transmitter site about 40 miles out of town. It was here, inspired by Oyama, that I seriously began to condition my hands and forearms by beating them on the tubular metal frame at the end of my army bed, which I’d wrapped in thick rope.  I also soaked my hands and forearms in a mixture of beef brine and vinegar, a recipe I got from my father.  I got the camp chippy to make me a makiwara, but after seeing the real thing many years later I realised I’d got the dimensions wrong from Oya Reikichi and E.J Harrison’s book The Manual of Karate. Mine was over 6 ft., solid and unbreakable, but those upon which I was to later practice were about 4 ft, flimsy, and easily broken.  

Although my conditioning regime had worked on my hands and forearms to a remarkable degree, I didn’t have knuckles anything like Oyama’s as depicted in his book What Is Karate.   So, one evening after anaesthetizing myself with a few beers, I went outside and set about trying to knock down a wall with my fists.  The result?  Two very large egg-like  knuckles on both hands which, when the skin finally healed and became calloused, served me well in the streets and bars of Nairobi against locals, squaddies and RAF personnel.  When I hit someone they often not only went down as if they had been poleaxed but many of them had lumps on their heads  as if they had been hit with a ball peen hammer.   

Oyama also inspired me to get seriously into  breaking, much to the annoyance of the site Sgt Major, who couldn’t figure out why  every one of the  paving slabs on the site, though still in place, were cracked—some of them twice.  Also, holes started  appearing in doors and walls and shelves started  disappearing, all thanks to my breaking practice.  I got my first taste of judo at the RAF judo club in Nairobi but because the calibre of the members was so low, I got bored and left.

It seems ironic now that Oyama was my inspiration in karate in the early days, because when I actually saw him in action his ability in no way matched up to the hype.  The legend of Oyama turned out to be largely a fiction, but as a young man I believed it.  And it was that belief, that imaginary benchmark, that drove me to strive for a higher level of performance as a fighter.  This is a phenomenon that we see a lot in sport.  For example, after Roger Bannister ran the four minute mile, everybody was doing it.  He’d broken through a barrier in people’s perception of what was possible.  Now let’s say that the clock had been fixed convincingly, and he hadn’t actually done it.  That’s what happened with me and Oyama.  I believed those breaks could be done, and so I did them.  I believed the whole mythology.  Only later did I learn that he had never had the amount of fights he’d claimed, the breaks were suspect, he’d never killed a bull...etc. 

I picked up information about fighting wherever I could find it.  My next posting put me in charge of a transmitter station in Benghazi.  There I leaned the rudiments of using a knife by way of an old Arab night watchman called Zahid whom I befriended.  This old guy also taught me some stand-up grappling moves and body-strengthening exercises, as well as how to make and use a sling. The site was occasionally bombarded with rocks by gangs of youths outside the perimeter fence, and at night wild dogs roamed the aerial field.  Using the sling I had fun dealing with the kids by day, and at night I went out and hunted the dogs.  I kept strategically-placed piles of rocks around the aerial field for that purpose.

In Benghazi I converted the small Nissen hut I was allocated into a dojo/gym complete with makiwara, homemade  ground-ceiling ball and  punchbag, weights, skipping rope, and numerous other pieces of equipment.  I also had a candle stand, and with a single punch or combo I could extinguish candles from more than a foot away.  Around this time—again  inspired by Oyama—I was also taking the top off the occasional bottle and  slapping and punching through bricks.

The role of breaking, hand conditioning, and heavy bag work is misunderstood in some segments of the martial arts fraternity these days.  Breaking has become stagey and is usually just a trick to give the illusion of power or chi or whatever, and as a result some martial artists distance themselves from the whole business of breaking.  My breaks weren’t done for the benefit of an audience and none of them were fixed.  The reason for doing breaking in the first place was that I needed some means, other than fighting, to objectively test the destructive effect of my hands.  These tests weren’t a substitute for fighting, but part of process of honing those  tools I needed  to fight with.

But there is more to breaking than many people think, and I'll pick up on this subject next time.

Some questions have arisen on various forums with regard to my relationship with karate.  To set the record straight, I'll be making a series of posts that will shed light on the events that have shaped my life as a martial artist, including how karate factors into the equation--and how it doesn't.

The seed of my martial art journey was planted when I was eight in Malaysia during the Bandit Campaign of the early 1950s, where my father was stationed preparing Gurkha troops for jungle warfare.  My father also organized sports days and events for the military stationed in Ipoh.  As part of the ‘other entertainment’ he recruited members of the Ipoh Chin Woo athletic association  to put on kung fu demonstrations, and so I  got to see kung fu at these events as well as at the local cinema, street vendors, local temples, recreational grounds, and kampongs where I played or visited my Malay, Chinese and Indian friends.  I can still clearly recall these images, which were to become a part of my personal imagery of how I believed the life of warriors to be. I also internalized images of my father’s physical prowess and the Fairburn-type training, milling, bayonet fighting, fencing and boxing training that he conducted in his gymnasium. I saw men running assault courses and the boxing tournaments that my father organized; I saw Gurkha troops training with the kukri  and engaging in bando-style boxing at special festivals, including the decapitating of a water buffalo with one stroke of a large kukri.  And I occasionally saw the bodies of Communist  bandits on the back of a Gurkha  truck parked near the school I attended.

As I’ve written in the autobiography on my website, I was a somewhat wild  kid, always in fights.  I was daring almost to the point of being suicidal.  My mother’s solution was to try to beat it out of me with cricket stumps, steel stair rods, or anything else that was hard that came to hand.  My father, a member of the Army Physical Training Corps Tough Tactic Teams, took a different approach.  He enforced a military style discipline and engaged me in the ways of the military gymnasium. He  encouraged me in sport to be fiercely competitive even when the odds were stacked against me—and he usually stacked the odds against me himself!  I can recall on sports days in Malaya (as Malaysia was then known), irrespective of how much older  and bigger some of the other kids were, he would handicap me in the sprints, throwing the cricket ball and other events.  He still expected to me win because I was Steve Morris’ son.  

My father treated me as if I were a much older boy; when I had tonsillitis as an eight-year-old child in Ipoh, I recall being  placed  in a Land Rover with a Gurkha driver armed with a Sten gun  at the height of the bandit campaign and making the long journey to Kuala Lumper Military Hospital to have my tonsils out. When I arrived at the hospital I refused to go on to the family ward and was finally put on the male ward instead, where I was taken under the wing of the soldiers who were hospitalized there.  Whatever the challenge, I was expected to rise to it.

Like any other kid, I had fights.  Unlike any other kid, I had lots of them, especially after moving from the rural setting of the Welsh farmhouse  where I was born to the bombed out slums of Nechells, Birmingham at the end of the WWII.  The frequency of these fights increased when I was placed in a military  boarding school in Germany from age 11 to 15.  Then, when my father was posted to Tripoli in 1958, I was persuaded by my parents to become a boy soldier.  As the numbers of boys around me increased, so did the frequency of my fights.  Whilst I’d always been a good scrapper, I  never stopped wanting to be a better one.  My motivation came not only because I loved to fight  and win—especially against older and bigger boys—but also because I ran a money lending racket at Harrogate, and getting my money back plus interest wasn’t always easy, if you know what I mean.   

As chance would have it, in 1959 shortly after becoming a boy soldier I saw an advertisement in Titbits  magazine for Leong Fu’s ‘Karato’ correspondence course (coincidentally, he was from Ipoh, the same place  I had spent some of my childhood).  I ordered it, and it was this course that sparked the next nine years of my resourcing all kinds of martial art material. I  collected  books and magazines on boxing, wrestling, ju jutsu, judo, fencing, karate, and military manuals on close-quarter combat and war  .During the nine years I spent in the Army I also  collected  Super 8 films on boxing (and even one of Muay Thai) as well as books on Buddhism and yoga.  I even became a member of the Buddhist society in Russell Square.  Key amongst my collection were four books I’d nicked from  my father: Jack Dempsey’s Championship Fighting and the three fencing books by Roger Croisner, Aldo  Nadi,  and CL de Beamount.

In hindsight, it was these four books that laid the foundations of much of my thinking about martial arts. However, as a teenager the more I read about  Japan, the samurai Zen Buddhism, and karate, the more I became convinced that the Japanese martial arts and karate in particular would take me to the next level as a fighter.  However, I had never seen karate in action except for a brief glimpse of it on a Cliff Mitchellmore  programme called ‘Tonight’ around  1960. My personal interpretation of karate was largely  based on the kung fu I’d seen as a child.

Then, in 1965/6 when on leave from Benghazi, I visited Vernon Bell’s karate dojo in London. What I had imagined karate to be—indeed, what I’d been teaching myself and testing in fights—was something completely different from what was going on in Vernon Bell’s dojo. I’d placed a completely different interpretation on the dynamics as well as application of  karate’s moves.  At the time, I just couldn’t believe that  what Bell’s students were practicing was  karate, particularly with regard to how they fought.  Their kumite bore no resemblance to any fight I’d ever had, or seen   And when some brown belt  broke a  baked half-inch board  after setting up as if he were going to attempt to knock down the fucking  Empire State Building (I was breaking bricks and slabs of concrete and taking the tops of bottles around this time),  I openly laughed  out loud.  The visit was a complete waste of time and I kept telling myself this couldn’t be karate.

But, as I was to later find out, it  was. So for those who state that it took me 30 years to find out that karate wasn’t what it was cracked up to be—actually,I’d already started to figure that one out  in 1965\6, long before karate had become popularized in the West.

I got a letter from Josh Lerner asking how to develop interconnectivity for fighting and I thought it was worth putting the reply up on the site.  You can read it here:

http://www.morrisnoholdsbarred.co.uk/07lettersinterconnectivity.htm